A blog dedicated to the rational discussion of politics and current events.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Illegal guns and gun control and the Boston bombers

cross posted from MN Political Roundtable

Illegal guns and the Boston Bombers (alleged)

We’ve heard repeatedly from the gun-huggers that if we pass gun control, only the criminals will have guns.

Never mind that in every comparably developed country in the eastern
and western hemisphere, where there is effective gun control, there is
less crime committed involving guns, far fewer suicides involving guns,
and far fewer accidents involving guns, especially accidents involving
children and firearms.

In the case of the Boston bombers, where an MIT campus police officer
was gunned down, we were told initially that the domestic terrorists
were heavily armed. We were told that the younger brother who was found
hiding out in a boat, wounded, fired on the FBI and ATF officers, who
were heard sending a fusillade of fire into the boat where the suspect
was hiding before he staggered out and surrendered. The boat owner in
interviews has rejected donations to replace his boat, directing them
instead to the survivors of this domestic terrorism, but apparently his
boat is irreparably damaged; it is trashed, it is a total loss, by the
number of bullets fired into it, as a result of someone firing
accidentally among law enforcement personnel, which was mistakenly taken
as firing by the suspect.

In the case of the preceding events, the day before, it now appears
that the two suspect bombers did not in fact rob a convenience store.
They did car jack a black SUV, apparently at gun point. In the
subsequent shootout to the fatal shooting of the MIT LEO, it has been
reported that over 200 rounds were fired, but it is unclear how many of
those rounds were fired by the older of the two suspects. It does
appear that the older brother was trying to use his firearm for some
form of suppression fire that would allow him to get closer to law
enforcement officers in order to devastate them with an exploding
suicide vest that failed. Apart from the injuries sustained from the
malfunctioning suicide vest which left bad burns, and the bullet holes
fired by LEOs that found their target – which don’t appear to be that
extensive, but hopefully that detail will become clearer at a later
time. What has been reported is that the older brother survived for a
number of hours after this exchange, in spite of the report that has not
so far been discarded, that the younger brother drove the large black
SUV OVER his brother’s body in his attempt to escape from the
authorities. Having a car drive over you, and being burned, and still
surviving for a number of hours at least suggests a lack of serious,
eventually fatal, bullet wounds to the terrorist from law enforcement.

Clearly, the response of law enforcement, as we all watched with
varying degrees of attention, the search for the second terrorist,
showed a lot of armed and armored up men. Clearly they were expecting
more suicide bomb vests, more IEDs, more gun fire. But equally clearly,
these two terrorists were NOT as well armed as first believed.

And the fact that the two terrorists had only one gun between them is
because gun control in states like Massachusetts, which has fairly
strict gun control, works, and it works well. Where states – and
cities, like New York City – are effective in gun control, those fewer
guns which are still problematic in crime come almost entirely from lax
gun control states. If those states better regulated the guns that get
into the hands of criminals, our law enforcement would be much safer,
innocent boats would not be riddled like swiss cheese, and suspects like
the second alleged bomber would quite possibly not be so physically
impaired as to make questioning as difficult as it has been — and THAT
would also make us all much safer.

We may never connect all the dots to explain how the two alleged
bomber brothers got their hands on a 9mm semi-automatic handgun, but we
may at some future point learn where it was originally sold. (I’m
betting on a Walmart, because they have a history of problems with
failures to properly follow laws, both federal and local, for firearms
sales while being the largest firearms seller in the country,) But we
already do know that the two brothers did not have a permit, and as
noted on the web site for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife:

GUN LICENSING REQUIREMENTS

Massachusetts residents 15 years and older who wish to possess,
carry, transport firearms, ammunition and feeding devices are required
to have a firearms license.

Additionally, Massachusetts has an assault weapons and assault-STYLE
weapons ban, which may explain why the only weapon in the possession of
the bombers was a handgun. States that have such bans in place have
fewer instances of gun crimes committed with that kind of weapon –
another indication that such weapons bans are effective. As a ‘may
issue’ state, law enforcement has the discretion to deny permits to
those who should not have firearms. If the two (alleged) bombers HAD
been armed with one or more assault style weapons, and with more hand
guns, as we have seen in other incidents involving shoot-outs with law
enforcement, it is likely there would have been more injuries and
possibly even fatalities among law enforcement. Boston, for all the
damage done by improvised bombs, had far fewer fatalities than the mass
shootings in Aurora, Colorado, in the suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, or
in the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Not one single privately armed person was instrumental in preventing
the actions of the bombers; no ‘good guy with a gun’ did a damned thing
to reduce the violence or prevent it. Private citizens armed like the
military is not the equal of a real military, of the forces of law
enforcement and other agencies that were so effective in dealing with
this domestic terrorism.

Gun control makes us free – free from gun violence, and freer from
armed terrorists. Real freedom, real public safety, real public health
decision require us to have MORE gun control, not less.

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